Coffeescript is not really a language, but it is
syntactic sugar for javascript. A nicer syntax. It compiles to javascript. It
uses indentation (like Python) to indicate code blocks instead of using curly
braces, for instance. And the way to declare functions is easier and less
verbose.

Coffeescript also allows classes, including constructors, and inheritance.

Nice: on the coffeescript site you can type in some code and get it
transformed in to javascript. Handy for trying it out.

The language isn’t difficult. You can learn it within the hour (he said ‘a bit
more than 5 minutes’). You can compile it into javascript on the server with
node.js. You can also include the coffeescript.js script in your page and let
the browser handle the compiling automatically (at a performance penalty, but
it is easier for development).

Django-coffeescript integrates the compiling into Django. And you can even put
inline coffeescript in your template. But normally you’ll just point at
external files.

Bonus tip: django-less. Less is css + variables +
nesting + inheritance. Integrated in the same way as django-coffeescript.

One drawback of coffeescript: it makes debugging harder as you have to debug
the javascript that comes out of the compiler instead of the coffeescript code
you just wrote.

Django is a bit technical. His thought: how to make the Django admin more
usable as a CMS that’s friendly? Another core thing in his thinkwork was the
idea of reusable apps.

If you look at the current admin, you directly see the huge number of
apps. Not nice.

Somebody made Django admin tools. Nice. A
good solution. It gives the admin a nicer layout and even a menu bar that
helps you find things.

The core idea: django-fluent-dashboard only modifies the first page of the admin: instead of
the big list of apps you get friendly, grouped, icons.

He made a modification (or plugin, or newer version, I don’t know) that looks
even nicer. More dashboard-based. See the example on the documentation site.

In the end, he hopes to turn it into a full CMS. There’s already a
django-fluent-contents and django-fluent-pages on github. But they’re separate
projects. django-fluent-dashboard works just fine with Django Fiber, for
instance.

Logbook is nicer logging for python
than the standard library’s default logging module.

And for Django: whatever logging module you use, use django-sentry to get a
website that collects your various site’s logs. He made a version that works
especially nice with logbook, as logbooks gives you all logs of a web request
if something goes wrong: it doesn’t only give you just the last traceback. So use
debug logging liberally, it will help you debug.

Django fiber is a simple,
user friendly CMS for your Django projects. It is getting bigger and
bigger. 11k downloads since April 7, 2011. That’s about 1250 downloads per
month. That’s only counted on pypi, though. Django CMS has 60k downloads since
the beginning of time, as a comparison. So it is turning out to be pretty big!